REPORT: Trash piles up in US following decision from China

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For months, a major recycling facility for the greater Baltimore-Washington area has been facing a big problem: it has to pay to get rid of huge amounts of paper and plastic it would normally sell to China.

Beijing is no longer buying, claiming the recycled materials are “contaminated.”

For sure, the 900 tons of trash dumped at all hours of the day and night, five days a week, on the conveyor belts at the plant in Elkridge, Maryland — an hour’s drive from the US capital — are not clean.

Amid the nerve-shattering din and clouds of brown dust, dozens of workers in gloves and masks — most of them women — nimbly pluck a diverse array of objects from the piles that could count as “contaminants.”

That could be anything from clothes to cables to tree branches to the bane of all recyclers: plastic bags, which are not supposed to go in recycling bins because they snarl up the machinery.

The article goes on to state the following:

At the end of the sorting line is the end product — huge bales of compacted waste containing paper, cardboard or plastics.

These have been bought up for decades by businesses, most of them based in China, which clean them up, crush them and transform them into raw materials for industrial plants.

Last year, China bought up more than half of the scrap materials exported by the United States.

Globally, since 1992, 72 percent of plastic waste has ended up in China and Hong Kong, according to a study in the journal Science Advances.

But since January, China has closed its borders to most paper and plastic waste in line with a new environmental policy pushed by Beijing, which no longer wants to be the world’s trash can, or even its recycle bin.

For other waste products such as cardboard and metal, China has set a contamination level of 0.5 percent — a threshold too low for most current US technology to handle.

US waste handlers say they expect China will close its doors to all recycled materials by 2020 — an impossibly short deadline.

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4 Comments

Harlan Wowie July 12th, 2018 at 9:30 am

It’s all about the ebb and flow of crap. They’re not taking ours, we shouldn’t be taking any of theirs. Hit them with more sanctions. Give ’em a tariff where it hurts. They’ll chicken out and fly right real soon.

ZS July 12th, 2018 at 11:21 am

S many sites innethat tell you how to recycle trash. Most people are too lazy to do it. I’ve seen people dump food from pan to trash container. Don’t blame them for wanting uncontaminated trash. Some people cannot follow simple instructions.